Horror!  What is this
Godforsaken thing I see?
Only a mirror?!

Cowboy Blob is having a Cthulhu-themed caption contest.  The way my creative process works is that I will often read and re-read stuff I have written and tweak it very slightly, sometimes changing only one word at a time until I think it's right.  After re-reading the other comments on his thread, I realized I made a mistake.  I should have made up the character's last name rather than his first.

If I could do it again I would call him something else, like Jenkins, because that was so frequently used by the Python folks, or perhaps something more Lovecraftian like Carter or Whateley.

Jenkins would be funnier, though.

UPDATE:  As expected, my toils produced 16 ounces of jerky.  So I have three 4-ounce vacuum-sealed packages ready.  Two further ounces were eaten by myself and the family for quality control, so I have two 1-ounce vacuum-sealed samples left.

The first two people who email me their snail-mail address will receive one of the one-ounce samples each.  Now I'll see if anyone actually reads this stuff or not.  This batch is not as hot as I wanted it, but it's still spicy.  It has been a while and I couldn't remember exactly how "spiked" my hot sauce had to be.  I need to spike it more.

---

Okay, this time I'm serious.  I have two pounds (pre-dried weight) on the dehydrator right now, and two more pounds to make tomorrow.  This will give me roughly 2 pounds (dried weight) of jerky, which be listed on eBay.

I'm starting this up again after a long time because I know it will sell and easily cover my internet expenses.  I'll probably make another 4 pounds or so next week.

This is jerky made from 90% lean ground sirloin.  The recipe is my own concoction, and is fairly hot from habanero but also slightly sweet.  Some people say it isn't real jerky if it's made from ground meat.  So far everyone who's eaten it says it's great, except for a couple of wimps who can't take the heat.  My son eats it, although it turns his face red.  My daughter eats it like candy without ever slowing down, but then she was eating nacho-sliced jalapeños out of the can when she was 2 years old.

The version currently in progress is only the standard version.  I have made it much hotter.  I'll probably make at least one batch extra-hot next time.

I'm considering offering some small free samples of it, but I haven't decided on that yet.

GUNS Magazine has an article about the new(ish) .50GI, built like a 1911 but shooting a new .50-caliber cartridge.


9x19mm on the left, .45 ACP on the right, .50 GI in the middle.

I might also add:  Now that's stoppin' power!

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Part of the difficulty in finding anyone to charge is because, initially, the crowd that restrained Dornay might have been justified in doing so, Satterberg said.

"The people who initially arrived on the scene had a limited right to use force in defense of Miss Dias," Satterberg said. "At some magic moment, they go from a justifiable use of force in defense of others to unnecessary force that becomes a criminal assault."

At first I wasn't going to put this in "the only ones" category, but after writing this up and re-reading the article, especially the guild's statement, I decided it should go there.

This at first attracted my attention because I think it must be a very unusual finding  in which no charges were filed against anyone.

What allegedly happened was, an off-duty cop was trying to walk his motorcycle through a crowd.  A woman tried to stop him by straddling the front wheel of his bike.  He couldn't get her to move, so he simply started driving, and may have used more force than necessary to dislodge her.  The crowd (some of her friends) at first used a justifiable level of force to protect her from the bike rider, but after they knocked him to the ground they continued to attack him.  He shot one of them in defense, wounding but not killing the guy.

Maybe this should go into "the only ones" category after all.  If the bike rider had not been an off-duty cop, would he have gotten off so easily for shooting someone in Seattle?  Maybe someone who knows more about Washington could comment on this.

The Police Officer's Guild is pretty clear on their opinion:

"The community cannot tolerate this type of violence against anyone, and especially against a law enforcement officer," the guild's statement read.

Why especially?  What makes him so special?  Especially since he wasn't on duty, and was not acting in any way to enforce the law or protect a civilian when it all started.  He was just throwing some drunk, obstinate woman off his bike.

From my reading of the article, it sounds like he was justified in using his firearm.

It sounds like there was plenty of fault to go around, but it strikes me as quite unusual for an incident like this to result in no one being charged with any crime.

So this one goes into the my "self defense" category, and into "the only ones" because of the haughty attitude of the guild.

This is pretty cool, from the Discovery Channel:

A power generator that not only produces electricity but also refrigeration and water could help fulfill basic survival needs when disasters such as Hurricane Katrina wipe out utility stations.

The heat-operated refrigeration system, developed by University of Florida engineers William Lear and Sherif A. Sherif, could offer a new paradigm for power companies that typically build large plants to service thousands of customers.

Instead, the closet-sized generators would produce power, water and air conditioning for smaller communities such as apartment complexes, hospitals and warehouses — even neighborhoods. It is compact enough to fit inside a military jet or large truck, and is designed for use in war zones, hurricanes or other disasters.

Unexplained Mysteries reports:  Physics proves horror movies get it wrong.

As a fan of these kinds of things, mainly as fodder for short stories and game scenarios, I could come up with sensible explanations as to why the scientists still have it wrong.  For example:

They argue it would take just two and a half years for vampires to wipe out the entire human race from the day the first one appeared, based on the myth that vampires turn their victims into other vampires by sucking their blood.If vampires feed once a month, the great grandaddy of all vampires would have killed one human and produced one vampire in the first month. So in total there would be two vampires and one less human, or a tally of vampires 2, humans -1.By the next month, the 2 vampires would kill 2 humans, and so on. After n months there would be 2 x 2 x 2 ... x 2 = 2n, or a geometric progression with ratio 2."The vampire population increases geometrically and the human population decreases geometrically," they say.Using the principle of reductio ad absurdum, they conclude that vampires can't exist as their existence contradicts the existence of humans.

Answer:  a vampire doesn't kill every time it feeds.  Also, in many contemporary vampire legends the bloodsuckers exercise a great deal of self-restraint, and sometimes hunt down and kill other vampires who are out of control.

But such explanations are silly, and perhaps a waste of time.  The worst thing about this is that someone actually got paid money to come up with "scientific" explanations about why vampires and ghosts can't really do what they do, when that money could have instead gone into, say, cancer research or something.  I'm still waiting for someone to explain why Geordi and Ensign Ro could stand on the floor but could still walk through walls on that one episode of ST:TNG, and they weren't ghosts, they were simply displaced dimensionally.  The floor shouldn't have been any different to them than a wall, a table, or any other surface not inherent to their dimension.

But anyway, I would like to offer this as evidence that the scientists have simply missed the point:


I rest my case.

No, it's not the second line of a haiku this time.  My sister sent me an email about a man named Scott Wade so I looked up his website.  He lives on a caliche road outside of San Marcos (Texas) and creates art in the dust that settles on his car's back windshield.


From his website:

These images drawn in the dust are obviously quite impermanent. One of the cool things about them is how they change over time. More dust accumulates as the car is driven down the road. Early morning dew streaks and dots the image, creating a patina. A light shower creates a deeper patina...

They probably haven't had much of a patina lately.  Should be plenty of dust there, though.

Some of his creations are reproductions of famous works, some are original.  You can see a gallery of them and read about how he creates them at his website, Dirty Car Art.

Top ten blog referrers for August:

1.  Gun Law News
2.  Hell in a Handbasket
3.  The War On Guns
4.  Cowboy Blob
5.  Resistance is Futile!
6.  Ride Fast and Shoot Straight
7.  Oscar Poppa
8.  Alphecca
9.  ChuBlogga!
10.  (tie)  Free Constitution and South Park Pundit

Top five posts for August:

1.  Gun Review:  Walther P22
2.  Cartridges of the Winchester 94
3.  1959:  the birth of the .22 Magnum
4.  Really weird-looking animal found dead in Maine
5.  Vintage Gun Ad:  Colt "In a Tight Place" (date unknown)

The article-which-must-not-be-named would have been #6 if I hadn't deleted it.  I wish G00gle images would re-index this site so I'd quit getting referrals to that post.  The top five posts of all time remain the same, although the order changed slightly.